Words Fail

Tag Archives: dream

How can it be summer already? But it is. School here ends May 23rd, and I’m off to present my thoughts about Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics in Michigan, so I decided to clear this off my plate in a simple but elegant fashion before I left. I’ll do something fancier in the fall. I’m trying to dream big, like I did as a kid, and I hope the kids at this school are too.

Today was a rough one for me; I had to report for jury duty at 7:30 a.m. and that sort of thing always throws me off course in a thousand ways. But inspiration came nonetheless. You just have to force yourself to open to it. Although I believe in participatory democracy and the right to a trial by a jury of ones peers, the actual process of serving the legal system in this way is oppressive. Getting up early, going through a metal detector, being forced to sit in a room full of strangers waiting for your number to be called, getting questioned by strangers and forced to conform to their mode of speech and behavior, listening to a nonstop stream of dialog inside a windowless room for 7 hours a day, having this all supersede whatever it is that you’ve chosen to do with your life. Plus, the judge cracked a misogynistic joke and made fun of a potential juror’s accent.

Basically, I didn’t want to do it, and when I was excused it felt as if I myself had been released from a kind of prison. The trial was going to be a minimum of 3 weeks! Ain’t nobody got time for that. I was planning of forcing myself to open to the possibility of jury duty. But it was just too much, and instead I was born anew into the early spring sunlight and opened myself to joy and inspiration and found this comic.

You know how you sometimes have these eye-opening dreams where everything seems infused with wonder and meaning and there’s some kind of message or idea you want to carry back to the real world but once you wake up and try to explain it to other people, even if you can actually remember the dream in its entirety, you still can’t communicate the deep and sublime feelings that it instilled in you as you slept? It’s like that.

This week I have a bulletin board to create, too. Everything depends on whether I have to serve jury duty, though. Ug. I really believe in democracy and the right to a trial by jury, I just don’t like being personally put out to ensure that it happens. I hate the courthouse and I hate being awakened too early and I hate being bossed around and I hate being forced to sit in merciless plastic chairs in huge rooms packed full of strangers. Jurors should be allowed to serve online. I would be much less uncomfortable if I could watch a trial on my laptop in bed.